


Scraped Palms, Future Proof

by Squash (JeSuisGourde)



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: Angst, Fluff, M/M, Pre-Season 5, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-29
Updated: 2018-12-29
Packaged: 2019-09-30 02:27:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17215319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JeSuisGourde/pseuds/Squash
Summary: Every morning that Ian's out of bed, it feels like that first morning again.  The relief, the smile, and Mickey's not sure what he's supposed to be doing as the smile grows brighter and then maybe almost too bright. What Mickey does know is that suddenly all he's ever wanted to do was stay. He wants to hold something that will make his hands soft. He wants to cut his palm and make a promise, for the first time in his life.





	Scraped Palms, Future Proof

**Author's Note:**

> Well, I started this story wanting to write something happy but it ended up being angsty with a vein of sort of happy. This takes place just before the start of season 5.  
> Warning: there is a mention of Milkovich-induced animal death in a flashback scene.

When Mickey was a little kid, he would grin every time he skinned a knee or an elbow, scraped the bottom of his chin, bruised his knuckles, felt the skin on his cheek bust under someone's fist. Reveled in the way the exposed flesh stung and prickled and turned itself angry red. When he was a kid, scrapes were trophies. Then they were unwanted badges that he'd done something wrong, sometime, somewhere. Then he took those trophies for himself. Sloughed flesh from flesh red with blood, shining with lymph and sometimes tears and usually fear. Don't mess with a Milkovich. They'll take your skin right off.

Lip said something to him once about a pound of flesh. He didn't get the joke, if there was one. Looked down at the spluttering bloody nose beneath him and the pretentious one not five feet away and told them both to be glad he had somewhere else to be right now.

He wonders sometimes if this is what Lip meant, Ian's one hundred fifty pounds of pale skin so still and empty in his bed, the terror shooting in lightning spurts through Mickey's veins. Sometimes Ian cries and it sounds like he's drowning. Sometimes Mickey stands outside the door and tries not to join in. When he breathes, it feels like the inside of his throat is rubbed raw. He looks at Ian's dull spine and someone scrapes all the skin off his face until the worry shows through and tears spring to his eyes. His vision drowns in them. He wants to punch a wall, repeatedly, until his knuckles fall off.

_You never learned to swim. You used to have dreams of drowning, dreams of sinking, dreams of warm water like tears or a bath but you can't get out and maybe you're not supposed to. You dreamed you couldn't breathe, had to breathe the river in. You dreamed of drowning until your mother took you to see how they turn the river green. A green river isn't as scary as a blue-black one. You thought. Now you dream of drowning in a green river, but you let yourself sink. It's warm like tears and you think you could float away on it if you weren't already drowning. If you weren't already breathing in._

Even when Ian's up again and the cuts have healed on both their faces, he doesn't say, “I was so scared. I thought you'd never get up again.”

He says, “'Sup asshole. There's beer in the fridge if you want some,” and pretends he doesn't feel every single muscle relax when Ian's fingers wind their way around his waist and press down against his skin.

They don't talk about it, just like they don't talk about Mickey's words in the Kash And Grab, just like they don't talk about the way Ian tried to run when Terry trapped them on the couch, just like they don't talk about how Mickey came out for Ian, just like they don't talk about the words trapped under the surface of their skin. Mickey wants to sit Ian down and ask him “What the fuck was that?” but they both know what the fuck that was. They're not going to talk about it. Shove the truth inside its cage and place it in a room with every imaginable lock and maybe you'll forget about it.

Mickey takes Ian's small smile, the one that's getting bigger every day, and clings to it. Happy. It's not a lie, they're both happy like this. It's just weird, living in a house with Mandy and two Russian women and his own son, and a newborn Ian in the midst of it all. Unfamiliar, not bad. It's the first time he's ever had people say goodbye as they leave the house, meaning “see you later,” and not slamming the door so hard it tries to split itself in two.

Every morning that Ian's out of bed, it feels like that first morning again. The relieved smile, the sigh, the growing helpless hollow suddenly full. The way Ian feels warm and solid in his arms. The way Mandy looks away like the back of her head can turn into a wall, like Mickey will kiss if it feels like no one's watching from the kitchen table. The way Mickey wants to, _wants to_ , can't. This isn't their bedroom. Specter of his father on the couch, living specter of his wife at the front door. Ghosts have power.

(And when Svetlana asked if you loved him and you said “Maybe, I dunno,” what you really meant was “Yes.” But just because you were out now didn't mean you weren't still terrified.)

 

The world and Ian have been upright for a week and a half now. Mickey is drinking a beer and reading the coffee-stained, two-week-old newspaper in front of him while he finishes a waffle with scrapings of peanut butter on it. Ian dumps ketchup all over his eggs, a red smear against soft yellow-white and Mickey wrinkles his nose. Ian grins, laughing at him, chin shifting forward, eyes so close to bright. Shoves a lump of egg in his mouth.

“I called today. The club said they'd take me back.”

Mickey feels his insides disappear. Buzz in his ears. In his brain. Face sliding from the soft smile to the hard, ready edge. “You're fucking serious. You're gonna go back to dancing at geezer fag central? Ian, it's just going to mess you up again.”

“The hell do you care what I do?” Ian's sneer is somewhere between bed-ridden cruelty and his usual upbeat insolence.

“Jesus, man, you just got out of fucking bed.” Mickey rubs his eyes. Scrapes at the worry. “I just don't want you to get hurt. Shit.”

“Well, what else can I do?” Ian's hand flinging out into empty space like a slap. “No one's going to hire a guy who never graduated high school, who went AWOL on the army and is living with and fucking a pimp from one of the most notorious families on the south side. Tell me, who's gonna want me?”

Mickey stares. Worry scraping his throat. Imagines Ian, face down in the snow, head full of snow, skin snow white, eyes bright and peaky with drugged up, hyperactive fog. Ian looks down at his plate, at the scrambled mess smothered in red ketchup. In the silence, a dog barks outside, loud, insistent.

_You are the dog, barking, barking, somebody shut that thing up. Always have been. You are the dog, maybe angry, maybe scared, wanting something you can't articulate. Spent your whole young life cowering in the corner, growling, biting at every big thing that loomed over you. Bit and tore and barked a warning until someone with a soft touch and a smiling voice came along and then you were barking wanting. Now you're barking fear, wanting, and some warm, scary something you can't articulate._

Someone shuts the dog up, and Ian looks up at Mickey from the eggs he's been playing with.

“Sorry. Fuck. Look, I don't want to be living off your money. If any shit goes down, I promise, I'm out. Sound good?”

The warm scary something slip-slides its way up Mickey's chest, tickles at the back of his throat and the joints of his jaw. “Yeah, okay, tough guy. Sounds good.”

Ian eats half his eggs, dumps the rest in the trash. Mickey says nothing about wasting food and watches the water sluice off the plate and into the sink as Ian washes his dish. Stares down at his own empty plate. Thinks about how he always picks up the leftover crumbs with one fingertip and puts them on his tongue. He's listening to the sounds of Ian in their room, humming some pop song as he gets dressed, when his wife comes through the door. Baby on her hip, grocery bag on her arm, the smell of something plastic burning wafting in after her.

“They light furniture on fire two blocks down,” she says, grimacing. “Smells horrible. I take the long way with baby so he does not breathe it in.”

“Someone didn't pay up, I guess,” Mickey shrugs. The word _karma_ doesn't exist on the south side. Here, it's called _walk your fucking talk or you'll never walk again_.

Ian's back in the room, properly dressed, but the humming is gone and Svetlana passes the baby off to him while she unloads groceries. Yevgeny gurgles and reaches out towards Ian's face. He smiles sweetly at the baby and Mickey drinks it in. Drinks in the light. Thinks about Ian's face in the dark in their room, so still, and in the flashes of light in the dark club, moving blurred and flickering. Only the light is so harsh. Nothing like this sunshine slipping out between Ian's lips in the living room.

“You going in tonight, then?” he asks, and hides in his beer can for the answer.

“Yeah,” Ian's smile falters just a little at the sight of Mickey side-eyeing him. His fingers caught in the baby's grip. “Figure it's better to start sooner rather than later, you know? Gotta make money somehow.”

“Hm.” Mickey doesn't know what he's doing anymore. He's trying to make sure Ian doesn't get hurt. He's cutting his thumb or his palm and putting his hand over his heart and all the other little things you do when you make a promise. He's clinging to pieces of warm sunshine.

Some switch flipped in both of them that night. He doesn't really know what happened inside of Ian. What Mickey does know is that suddenly all he's ever wanted to do was stay. He wants to hold something that will make his hands soft.

 

Ian is pulling on clean clothes and shoving a water bottle in his backpack. He's grabbing an energy bar and a bottle of gatorade off the counter like he's about to go for a run and it isn't eleven thirty at night. He's squeezing Mickey's shoulder and leaning down to kiss him and Mickey can't do anything but lean into the kiss goodbye and sigh frustration roughly through his nose because you can't stop a Gallagher just by wrapping your arms around him. He knows. He's tried. Ian calls goodbye and the door slams _see you later_.

Mickey goes to the Alibi, hoping for a bar fight, hoping to take someone's skin off. He doesn't get one. He just drinks until he can see the worried cracks in his own skin. All the little places where he's peeled something back for or because of Ian. He thinks about playing pool but he can't concentrate. He tries to watch the television but he can't concentrate. He thinks about going home but what he's really thinking about is Ian, so he finishes his drink and has one more and when he gets home all the lights are off and there's no one there.

He gets another beer out of the fridge and takes off his clothes and gets in bed and lights a cigarette. Lights another cigarette. A third fucking cigarette. It's fucking dark in his room with the lights off and his phone in front of his face. He almost wishes it was cold, too.

It's weird to think that he could get used to sleeping next to someone else so fucking fast. That he could miss it so fucking fast. He drifts in the twilight between wake and sleep until his cigarette burns the sensitive skin between his fingers and he hisses awake and pinches it out. Now he's awake. It's four in the morning and the sky outside is a blue-black like water, a sky you could drown in.

He hears the front door open and close, hears the refrigerator open and close and the crack of a fresh water bottle. He knows the old routine: Ian creeps in, Ian chugs a bottle of water, Ian showers, Ian crawls into bed. He slides down the bed and waits.

The shower doesn't turn on. Ian slips into the room and turns on the lamp and through slitted eyes Mickey can see that his whole body looks like it's being pulled toward the floor. Like whatever was holding him up this morning is gone and he's just a walking sack of meat pulling his clothes off and running his hands through his hair and yawning hugely. Ian turns off the light and crawls into bed, his chest pressing flush and flushed against Mickey's back. For a moment, Mickey wants to pull away. Wants to be annoyed, to wallow in absence. But Ian's leg slips soft between his thighs and his arm slips over Mickey's arm like a freckled blanket and Ian kisses the back of his neck and sighs past Mickey's ear. His bones slide out of the sigh with exhaustion inside of them and Mickey tightens his grip on Ian's fingers instead of pulling away.

 

When Mickey was a little kid, any scraped together money was spent on booze and half the time the rent got paid but the water bill didn't and most of the time his stomach had been scraped clean for days and he was learning resilience, learning how to survive, and then his mother died and he knew nothing but the fact that nobody cared. He learned that he could only rely on himself alone. Mickey thinks about the feeling of a days-empty stomach while the groceries rattle in the back seat.

He knows Ian's stood in that same empty lot looking for scraps. It's cheesy but he hopes his kid never has to do that.

“I'll get the door, you just get the stuff from the back,” Mickey says, looping plastic bags onto his arms and kicking the car door shut. He hears Ian pop the trunk as he climbs the front steps.

Three heads turn to look at him as he shoulders the front door open. He frowns. “Uh.”

“I came to see Ian,” Debbie explains from the couch. “But he's not here so Mandy and Svetlana and I are hanging out.”

“Uh huh.”

“I like her,” Svetlana grins, catlike, warm and cold at once. “Smart. She grows up good.”

“Where's Ian?” Mickey jerks his thumb behind him, towards the street. Ian pushes his way in, arms laden with groceries, bumping the door closed with one hip. “Ian!”

“Hey, Debs. Wait, help me with these bags, then I'll give you a hug.”

Mickey unloads the groceries and watches from the corner of his eye as a smiling Ian is led back to the couch to sit with the girls and chat. He likes Debbie more and more every time he sees her. She reminds him of Mandy. Of Ian.

Once the food is away, he stands in the middle of the kitchen and flounders. He could go to his room and drink but something in him wants to be a part of this. Wants to be around people, around Mandy and Ian. Mostly Ian. Even when he tries to push it away some animal part of his brain gravitates towards Ian. Some magnet in the center of his chest, in his skin. He sits down on the couch, turns on the TV and the xbox, starts up Call Of Duty with the volume down, and zones out with one ear on the game and one on the conversation. Looks up every time he catches Ian's smile in the corner of his eye. Mostly they're talking boring chit-chatty bullshit, joking about Kev, cooing over Yevgeny, asking Ian what work's like after being back for almost three weeks. Their voices reel him in when Debbie is whining about bitches at school. About self-defense and fighting and getting revenge.

_You and Mandy used to play Knight In Shining Armor. Of course, you only called it that until you were old enough to know that turning it into a game doesn't make anything any better. That arms and stillness are a better shield than distracting the beast. That protection in a house of horrors is just dealing with the aftermath, all the burns and scrapes the dragon made. You used to joke that Mandy made a better knight than a princess. She'd tell you to go fuck yourself. She was seven and you were eight. She got to be a princess until you were seven and then your mother died. You never got to be a prince, not even when you were little. Always the knight. Always the bruised and broken champion with a missing helmet, shield in tatters and torch smoldering. Always patching up the holes. You learned to fight the dragon so early. But it was always the dragon, never anybody else. Even when he was hidden away and slumbering, the dragon was in the way. You never even thought there might be a princess or a prince or even a prize on the other side._

Debbie is saying, “Plus, if I learn to fight, I can actually _do_ something. You know, I have the shiv, but they'll kick me out forever if I use it. Fighting just gets you suspended.”

“I can teach you to fight.” Mickey offers, glancing at the little group, one eye still on his game. An opening. Let another Gallagher see the Mickey that Ian gets to see.

“You're not teaching her anything, Mickey.” Ian sounds amused, stern, and a quick glance tells Mickey he's being given that look, the _oh you_ , the _you're a shit but I like you_ , the _I can't believe you're like this_.

Debbie pouts her disappointment at Ian. “Why not? I want to learn.”

“This is true.” Svetlana weighing in, her rolling voice warm and cold like her smile. “It is useful to know how to fight. Mickey could be good teacher. He has good form for someone who learned how to hit from watching movies. I know. I see him fight.”

“When?” Debbie leaning forward, interested, eager. “Did he fight someone for you?”

“No, when he told his father he is gay.”

Too much. He doesn't want to be hearing about that shit like it's just some casual night out, just a casual bar fight out. Like they didn't both come out of it lucky to be alive. Like it's not fairly uncertain that Ian _did_ come out of it alive. “Jesus, would you quit talkin' about me like I ain't here?” he snaps, “Never fucking mind. Go back to talking about your fucking crushes or whatever it is you girls do.”

Svetlana sneers at him but changes the subject. He goes back to his game and avoids Ian's gaze. Avoids Mandy's frown. Hides in the gunfire of the game and the clatter of the controller but in his head he's just thinking about the feeling of his palm coming down hard on a wooden counter, a fist coming down hard on his face, his chest slamming hard on the snow-covered hood of a car, Ian's ultimatum slamming hard into his chest.

He didn't learn how to fight from watching movies. They all know that but won't say it. That he learned how to fight because his father's fists were heavy and his brothers' fists were heavy and then he had to take on the street as well. Unwanted badges and then bloody trophies for the taking.

Part of it was always that Ian would never really understand. He didn't grow up watching graves being dug in the yard and into his own skin. Not like Mickey had. He didn't count the new scars on his body at the end of each year like rings on a tree. Mickey grew up with a mental inventory of every weapon in the house. Dozens of them. And the knives he kept under his skin. Every time his father was home his whole body was a flinch. Even alone his shoulders stayed up. Living on the aggressive edge of anxiety. Lived a life perpetually dumping the bodies of his thoughts, anything that wasn't necessity had to go. Rolled under the bed, out the window, burned up in a cigarette. Learned to need nothing, nothing at all so that every time he bled it was nothing and every near-miss with the cops was nothing and every other person around him except maybe Mandy was nothing. He was angry for a long, long time when Ian turned himself into something. Because it didn't ever change how he lived with fear nestled against his skin and a body built on scars and ugly memories and a mad dash to survive. A life made of unprotected left turns, a calculated scramble past oncoming danger towards his goal. He could take a bullet but he couldn't take the thought that _nothing_ had solidified firmly into _something_ , which lay beside him every night whether or not there was actually a body there.

(So when he finally admitted to himself that the body next to his was _something_ , it turned into _everything_ instead, and here he is.)

Ian smiles when Debbie finally leaves, waving goodbye from the porch, smiles while they make dinner, smiles and babbles happily and Mickey listens and takes in the grin, the sunshine. They don't talk about it, but Mickey knows Ian sometimes sees the way he stares with a sort of thankfulness at that smile, at the way Ian's hair is clean and his skin is bright and he's standing. Because when Ian smiles sometimes all he can think of is the jarring bruise of that first day he wouldn't get up, and the fear.

So he watches Ian wash the dishes while he clears away the weeks of cans and bottles on the table and he watches Ian play with the baby and watches Ian write in his notebook and the thought that this is the happiest he's ever felt quietly strangles him. “Is cute,” Svetlana had said to him the other day, “You and orange boy. You spend all day watching him. You do anything for him, no matter what.” He'd rolled his eyes and told her to shut the fuck up but he hadn't denied it.

“Watcha doin'?” He sits down next to Ian on the couch, curls his arm round the back of it, across Ian's shoulders.

“Writing stuff. Ideas, y'know? Writing about you.” Ian's eyes are mischievous when he looks up. Two green lights shining.

“What about me?”

“Not telling,” he grins. “But I can show you.”

 

Mickey's finishing a cigarette on the back porch and Ian's finishing his lunch at the kitchen table and even though the door is barely cracked open, Mickey still leans against the wall to look through the tiny line of space at Ian's profile. A little secret snapshot, only there's a small smile on Ian's lips and Mickey wants to ask _Do you see me see you?_ but he stubs out his cigarette butt instead and clatters inside. Watches Ian tear his grilled cheese into chunks and eat them one square at a time.

“Hey,” Mickey's fingers skim the back of Ian's neck, playful smack softened to something even less, even more. “I'm thinking of sneakin' into that new Mad Max movie that's playing, wanna come? Get a dog, see a movie.” He grins and cocks his head. “Heard it's good.”

“Sure,” Ian giving him that little smile that says _Why_ wouldn't _I want to go somewhere with you?_ “I'll put on my shoes.”

It's finally really getting warm again, and the world is that soft sort of bright like a painting, and Ian is walking to Tommy's with him in the sunshine, smiling sunshine, and Mickey almost forgets himself and wraps his fingers around Ian's, only he remembers at the last second and instead they bump shoulders as they walk. He skin tingles through his t-shirt. The warm scary something wraps its fingers around his chest and he knows it means he'd fucking step in front of the L if it meant seeing Ian smile and laugh and hearing him say his name. He thinks maybe he doesn't mind.

“You ever think,” Ian muses, mustard on the corner of his mouth, “what it would be like to have a real job?”

Mickey frowns, partly to keep himself from reaching over and swiping his thumb against the corner of Ian's mouth. “What are you talking about? You've _had_ a real job. You worked at the Kash And Grab, didn't you?”

“Yeah, but first of all, it's a shitty little corner store.” Ian smirks, and he walks into a slice of sunlight beaming through an alley and turns into a glow. “And second, I was fucking Kash at the time, and you can't tell me that's normal.”

“It might be.” Not like Mickey's ever had a real job. And he wouldn't count the Kash And Grab either. “Why're you thinking about that, anyway?”

“Dunno. I was just thinking at some point I could try and get a real job. Something, like, respectable or whatever.”

“Dude, like a month ago you didn't even want to get your GED. What are you talking about fucking real jobs for, now?”

Ian's shrugging, smiling, glowing. Someone's turned the painting luminescent. “Just thinking maybe I'll give applying a try, I guess. Maybe I'll try and become an entrepreneur.”

“Yeah, sure, you'll be the next Mark fucking Zuckerberg.” He holds the door open for them both and rolls his eyes. “Come on, throw your fucking trash away, we gotta sneak in over here.”

Mickey picks a seat in the very back, in the corner. He tells himself it's so they don't get caught sneaking in, but he also knows that at some point during the movie, Ian's lips will be on his, and he's not going to want to stop.

Mickey reaches out and wipes the mustard from the corner of Ian's mouth in the dark, and catches Ian's velvet smile as the screen flickers on and the commercials start. In the flickering of the movie Ian looks young and sweet, in the flickering that's not hard and blurred and strange like in the club, his eyes two shining green lights looking up, not two blank green rivers looking down with chaos stirring under the stillness. Mickey spends all of the commercials looking at the side of Ian's face. Feeling whatever hollow was digging a burrow in his chest quickly filling back up. Feeling every particle inside him pull towards the man sitting next to him, his skin has been magnetized.

Ian's lips find his twenty minutes into the movie. He feels his body relax as Ian's hand slides into his hair and grips, so warm. Their lips press together, hard, and they're breathing into each other's mouths, and there's something so normal, so fucking _teenage_ about kissing in the back of a movie theater that Mickey smiles into Ian's mouth. And Ian giggles a little in response and his mouth trails hot along the side of Mickey's jaw and then back to his lips. Back to the center. Back to the way Mickey feels the warm pull under his skin. Ian curls their fingers together in the dark. Mickey doesn't pull away.

So they kiss like it's normal to find sunlight in a cave, like they're digging into each other in the dark. Ian's tongue is soft against his. Warmth sloshes in the pit of Mickey's stomach, washes up the back of his head. Ian's already burned into the backs of his eyes. Ian's already burned into his fingertips. This is nothing like kissing in the club. More danger, less performance. But it's darker here. Maybe he can climb inside Ian here. Maybe his skin is prickling under Ian's fingers and not under someone else's gaze. Maybe his gut shakes with that warm scary something and not with instinct.

Only he opens his eyes and glances down the rows and there is a couple there, staring at them, and he knows how this goes. He's read the news, he's seen the stories. He's lived in this world long enough. He wants to give the big _fuck you_. He wants to turn away and turn back to Ian's lips and Ian's hands but the warm scary something has been replaced with _scared_ and he's lived his life with instinct too long not to listen. He jerks back, jerks away, sees Ian's gaze follow his glare down the rows to their audience. Feels Ian shrug and pull back with a slide of fingers against the top of his ear, an _it's okay, I get it_ , his fingertips rubbing, _I don't want that deathbed scene either, and maybe it won't end that way here, but we both don't want to risk it_.

Ian settles back into his own seat. Sniffs. Leaves a momentary silence where the movie filters in. Glances at him. “Going to the rub n' tug later?”

Mickey shrugs. Guard back up. “Yeah, I guess.”

“Gonna be home tonight?”

“What kinda stupid ass question is that? 'Course I will, where else would I go?”

Ian looks at him, looks back up at the movie. “Just wondering, I want to see you before I go to work.”

“See me.”

That mischievous grin, those two green lights. The way Ian breathes in like he's trying to smell Mickey's skin from all the way over there. “I could say 'fuck you.'”

Mickey gives him a look. Doesn't manage to keep it from splitting into a grin, his shoulders dropping. “There we go, Gallagher.”

“So?”

“Yeah, I'll be home. Yeah. Let's watch this fucking movie.”

And he is home when Ian gets back from talking to Fiona or hanging out with Debbie or going for a run or whatever the fuck it is he does while Mickey is at the rub 'n tug, counting money and checking up on business and making sure Kev isn't fucking it all up somehow. Mickey is home when Ian gets back and Mickey is home when Ian's mouth covers his and Mickey is really, really home when Ian's skin presses against his.

Ian's mouth is trying to climb inside his mouth. Mickey is folding his limbs around Ian and trying to open his ribs for him to stay. Ian's fingers press inside him, full and sweet, and Mickey arches into the touch, arches into the sweat that breaks out across his forehead when Ian bends and flexes his knuckles. It's warm, not warm enough for the window to be open but warm enough to shove the blankets off the bed so Mickey's clawing at the mattress instead. Tugging at Ian's hair, get a move on. The hinge of Ian's jaw pressed up against Mickey's jaw as he pushes inside, blunt and heavy and full and a sigh comes out of someone, a sigh that says more with a sound than half the words in the world could. Half a second where the world slows down and then the heat takes over and Mickey's fingernails dig into Ian's shoulders.

And it's hard, Ian thrusting fast into him, the quick, deep drumbeat rhythm that has them lost for breath and digging into each other's skin but every pull of Mickey's fingers is saying _I want you inside me_ and every one of Ian's breaths is saying _I want to be inside of you_. And Ian is panting so hard his face is red, and Mickey is gasping out _jesus, jesus_ , and his skin is on fire and Ian's skin is on fire and there are infernos blazing up where they touch. It feels a little like Mickey is dying like he's breathing in nothing but Ian like everything is blurring together and exploding apart and the world is rebuilding itself low in the base of his spine and the movement of Ian's body is controlling all of it forever. Mickey buries his face in the fold of Ian's arm as Ian's hips snap forward faster and faster and it only reminds him that he's in love with a whirlwind. Not the sweep you off your feet kind, but the Chicago kind, the punch you in the face and keep on pushing kind, the kind that shoves you in a direction until you have no choice but to go that way.

There are going to be fingerprint-shaped bruises on Mickey's thighs for days but who fucking cares when it feels like this? When Ian's mouth drags across his skin and his blood is fucking boiling just from being touched like this, being fucked like this. Ian's hips slamming into his and Mickey's panting, gasping for air and he is inside the inside of himself and exploding outward, head arching back as he comes, fingers scrabbling at Ian's spine. And Ian bites his shoulder, wraps his arms around Mickey's neck, pistons faster and faster and the bed shakes like it's falling apart and Mickey shakes like he's falling apart and then Ian grunts and mangles his name in a cry and stills, pushing in in in and collapsing into Mickey's ribcage with a heavy sigh.

“Jesus, that was good,” Mickey gasps, can't catch a breath. Ian's still panting into the hollow of his throat, pushing kisses there, running soothing a hand across Mickey's belly at the overstimulated wince when he pulls out. “Fuck.”

“Fuckin' great,” Ian agrees, rolling off to lay beside him. Grinning, face red, whirlwind in his eyes. Mickey reaches out and wipes away a bead of sweat as it slides down Ian's face.

It's barely even dark outside. Mickey swipes a cigarette from the pack dangling off the edge of the table, lights it. “Don't you have work in,” he gropes for his phone, “like an hour?” Ian shrugs and plucks the cigarette from Mickey's lips, breathes in the smoke while Mickey watches the ember flare and light his lips orange.

“Yeah. I'll shower in a sec,” he says, not moving. Mickey slips his hand deep into Ian's hair and combs backward, feeling the gust of a sigh against his shoulder.

And, man, Mickey never thought this house could somehow contain this kind of happiness. This warmth that has his blood pulsing slow and gentle like a tide. Some nights he wishes he could flip his hands over backwards so he wouldn't have to see their scars. He wants to hold something that will make his hands soft. He wants to scrub all the blood and guts and pain out of these floors and these walls and his own skin. And every other person's story has some sort of redeeming factor but he's never been anything other than directionless anger and sharp, muddled anxiety, and his loyalty has never done anything but get him in fucking trouble. This is something, though, this feeling of taking someone in his arms and holding on instead of shoving. The hurt that is under his skin instead of inside of it, that he'd run from if he could but his flesh is magnetized. The way he's given in to the pull. The way he wants to cut his palm and make a promise, for the first time in his life. The way he wants to let Ian crawl inside him like a second skin. The way he wants Ian to make him soft.

(And they've always slept chest to back, ever since that first time, Ian's chest to Mickey's back, and it's always so hard to tell who's protecting who.)

“Gotta get going,” Ian says, kissing him on the cheek and hauling himself off the bed towards the bathroom. Mickey's cheek tingles; he watches him walk away.

“ _Let's kill something,” you said to your brothers as a child. “Let's kill something.” So they'd taken you hunting. Not in the forest some fucking where but in the alleys and dumpsters for a stray cat or dog and when they found one you brought it squirming and yowling back to the house. A mangey brown and white cat with a busted eye and a nose all brown and split and when it opened its mouth to yell you could see its teeth were broken. “Let's kill something,” you'd said, thinking maybe you'd feel something that wasn't wounded, so they handed you weapons and told you you could pick. You wanted the wishbone, because your brothers were always the ones that got it when the shelters and charity programs gave you a turkey on the holidays. You wanted the wishbone, because you never got to make wishes. Because wishes were stupid but maybe if you took them instead of having them handed to you it would happen. So you wanted the wishbone. You were young, you knew how to shoot a gun but not well enough so you picked a knife instead. You stared into the cat's yowling eyes and its sounds turned into your sounds and then into your father and you slit the ragged fucking thing's throat and watched it struggle and spray blood on the grass behind the house. Watched it claw at the air and something scraped against your chest. You thought you'd feel something like control. You didn't feel regret. Dead is dead. The scraping in your chest was anger. The scraping in your chest was jealousy at the way the thing fought and bit and struggled. You spat in the dirt and wiped the knife on your jeans like your dad would do. Cats don't have wishbones. You didn't know that. Now you do._

 

Mickey breaks the surface of sleep, suddenly, bewilderingly awake in the darkness, and blinks at the instinct to tense for an attack. Frowns at the alarm inside of him saying _there's someone here_ , because that can't be right. There's no one in here. There's someone in here, _out there_ , says the alarm, says Mickey's gut as he looks around the room. Someone or someones are somewhere they're not supposed to be. Instead of being met by the gentle snores of Ian at his back, he is crashed by the waves of sound thudding in from the kitchen. Music, loud, pounding enough that the bass slips in behind Mickey's back teeth. He stumbles out of bed, rubbing his eyes, hoping it's Iggy all high on coke again or some shit.

Only it's not, and it's Ian, his hands fluttering like frightened birds, looking electric and loud in the quiet stillness of the earliest hours. He's chopping carrots, fast, too fast, like there's something circling over him and he needs to be finished yesterday. But Mickey can see his eyes are deep green rivers with chaos underneath, and the smile on his face is so small it's almost invisible.

“Ian, what the fuck?” The jerk, the spin, a frame on fast-forward.

“Sorry—ah!” Ian hisses, clutching his hand to his chest and for one alarming moment Mickey thinks he's cut his finger off, but he steps closer and there is bright red blood welling out of a long gash in the side of Ian's index finger. Another fucking sacrifice to these walls, because even the Milkovich house takes your skin off. It's not a punishment this time, not a trophy, just a blind sort of fear-scribble in the pit of Mickey's stomach, that raw scrape that has nothing to do with his own skin for once and everything to do with someone else's.

Mickey jabs at the ancient cd player until it shuts up. “Run that under some water, asshole.”

Ian does as he's told, shoulders up around his ears like he doesn't know what's going on either. “Sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

“Jesus, Ian, you don't have to apologize so much. I just don't want you slicing your goddamn hand off.” He wants to know what the fuck this is. He wonders if maybe he knows what the fuck this is. He's not going to think about it. Put that thought in a box and put it in a room with every lock he can think of and maybe he can try and forget about it.

There's a gap in the panic and in it something is crying, and then Svetlana appears in the kitchen with Yevgeny in her arms, and Yevgeny is wailing. His face is red and wet. His hands stretch and stretch into the air. His sound takes the place of the music but at least his sound makes sense.

Svetlana's eyes are still closed, but everything about her is hands around a throat and hammers in the night even if they've all finally forgiven each other and she growls, “It is four in the morning, assholes. You wake fucking baby. Be glad I do not take knife to your throat.”

“Shit, sorry, Svet.” Ian reaches his hands out for the crying baby. Svetlana sighs and hands the child over, lips curled in half-awake annoyance. Ian holds the baby like glass, a fragile bird, the smallest, sweetest thing in the world. He kisses the wispy head, rocking, voice the smallest secret whisper. “Hey, Yevgeny. I'm sorry I woke you up. Shh, shh, it's okay, hey.”

The wails trickle into cries which stutter into hiccups, Ian's fingertips wiping tears from little cheeks. His hands slow and gentle where two seconds ago they were weird frightened bleeding wild things. He rocks and rocks the baby, rocks and rocks himself. Mickey's standing in the middle of the kitchen thinking about the buzzing in his head and the food on the counter and the urge to give Ian his hands with promises cut into them, just so he has something to hold on to.

Svetlana holds her hands out, jaw set, glaring blearily. “I take him now. Shut the fuck up for rest of the night.”

Ian hands over his charge, shoulders at his ears again. Watches mother and child turn away and retreat back to comfort and quiet. “Sorry, Svetlana. Night, Yev.”

There are vegetables strewn across the kitchen counter. Ian's cutting board of massacred carrots and a bowl of chopped up celery and a gauntlet of thin plastic bags with other ingredients waiting for slaughter. Through the window over the sink the dark pushes in, a reminder of what time it actually is. A reminder of the confusion and the way everything feels like it's under pressure. Worry scrapes at Mickey's throat and he tries to swallow it down. Mickey inhales a lungful of glass. Flings his hand out at the kitchen like a slap, even when he doesn't mean to.

“What the fuck is all this?”

Ian shrugs helplessly, swaying a little on the spot. There are bags under his eyes, he's looking peaky and too bright. “I don't know, Mick. I got back from work and I was so fucking wired. I just remembered Fiona and Sean talking about recipes the other day when I was in at Patsy's Pies, and we went grocery shopping last week so I kinda figured I'd try and make something.”

“Jesus, Ian, at four in the morning? Come on, man. You're not on something, huh?” Ian's shoulders drop, his body drops, he shakes his head but there's a look on his face like he's being torn in two. Mickey gets close, slides a hand across the back of Ian's neck. “Hey, you're probably just tired. I know you haven't slept so great recently. You used to get all weird and giggly like you were on something when we pulled all-nighters, too.”

“Yeah, probably.”

“Come on, let's go to bed. We can put all this shit away and you can cook tomorrow, at a decent time.”

Ian surveys his destruction and nods, face and body quieting. “Okay.”

So they pull out some tupperware and empty butter containers and the mangled vegetables are corralled and the ones still whole are back in their bags and back in the fridge and Ian's hands are back to sitting calm at the ends of his wrists. Mickey dumps the cutting board in the sink and washes the knife. Ian shuts the fridge door and Mickey watches the curve of his spine, watches the way the little hairs at the back of his neck catch the light.

And Ian follows him back to their room, back to the bed, to undressing and sliding under the sheets and they don't turn off the lamp but Mickey takes his hands and kisses the backs of them, takes his face in his hands and kisses that, too. Ian flips onto his back and puts his hands on his stomach and stares at the ceiling, eyes bouncing from subject to subject but his blinks are tired and slow.

“Sorry for freaking you out. I didn't mean to,” Ian's voice is soft when he speaks, barely louder than the rustle of the sheets.

Mickey shrugs it away. Thumbs the corner of his eye to scrape the worry away, to not think about it. “You're fine, Ian. Go to sleep.”

“Okay.” He rolls onto his side, tucks his face up against Mickey's ribs. Mickey's fingers bury themselves deep in his hair, scratching gently. Like he does sometimes. Like an anchor. “Night.”

“Night, Firecrotch.”

Ian falls asleep with Mickey's hand in his hair. Ian's nose presses into Mickey's ribs just below his nipple and his breathing has smoothed out into the gentle wash of a tide. Ian has dark circles under his eyes and his hands that were such frightened birds lie limp on the mattress in front of him.

So he doesn't want to think about it. He doesn't want to think about it but there's a helpless hollow digging a hole inside of his chest again, only this time it feels like everything is on fire instead of falling. Ian used to be the one so still and calm it freaked Mickey out, made him want to clench and unclench his fists, made him want to twitch and squirm and find something to fuck up while Ian just watched him with his eyes, body still, smile calmly fixed. Now Ian's body is crackling, sparking, and his hands are frightened birds sometimes and he glows so warm it hurts and when did Mickey find himself standing and watching so still?

So he doesn't want to think about it. Too bad. The worry scrapes at his throat and the warm scary something that has a name he's not quite ready to say floods the back of his head and the backs of his eyes.

He wants to say it's not that bad. He wants to say we've both had worse, one thousand times we've had worse. In the daylight it's not so bad, but here's the thing: in the dark all fractured facets of light fall away. Rearrange the pieces of the puzzle: Ian sobbing helplessly in the middle of the night turns into the sound of a knife chopping away at the carrots of impulse. The way Mickey held on in the dark turns into something weird and slippery in the day. Dead stillness turns to speed.

(And he wants so bad to find something to blame that isn't one or the other of them. Does blame really matter? In the end, does blame really matter when he's so determined with his torch and his shield and his cut up hand on his heart?)

He wonders if this is what he gets for spending three and a half years not walking his talk, like the explosive blood-filled reaction and the black and sucking aftermath weren't enough. Karma's a bitch on the south side. Karma takes your promises and makes them lifelines. It takes your scrapes and makes them wounds. You get happy with that thread of stupid fucking fear a dark and itching undercurrent alongside. Maybe this is his fucking karma: Ian in bed, numb and falling apart, Ian out of bed, sparking, too fast, too bright. It's always been easy for Mickey to shake off giving a shit about consequences. He could maim and steal and threaten without blinking. He'll take the scrapes and the half-assed happy and the cold side of the bed and his scarred palms. He'll take locking truth in a box in a room with a thousand locks, because at least he knows if she gets out he's still going to stand there like a stupid rock and hang on. If this is what he gets when he picks Ian, he'll take it. He always knew his life would be a fight. He always knew it was dumb to wish with or without a bone but he's always done it anyway. He's already shown his soft parts, not caring if the touch is gentle or not. He's already spilled his blood and bared his flesh and twice sacrificed his freedom and cried into a pillow and into his fist and into a gun. He's already paid twice the price. He's offering Ian his hands and his heart, that pound of flesh Lip was talking about, and he's not even going to ask for payback. He doesn't give a fuck about consequences. He doesn't give a fuck about karma. He's south side. He knows what he's getting into. Karma's a fucking idiot.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I figured the sneaking into the movie theater was one of those things Mickey considered a "real date" in 5x10 but Ian didn't. Also I picked Mad Max Fury Road because I think it came out around the time that pre-season 5 took place.  
> Oh, also, they do dye the Chicago River green for St Patricks Day.


End file.
